IN ENGLISHDuring the winter I thought that it would be interesting to experiment what dyes work well with tannin as a mordant. The problem is that I don't have much time in the summer for experiments because of the market, but then I thought that while I am now mordanting yarn for the summer with alum, I can also now mordant small samples with tannin, and during summer I can put small pieces of these yarns to my normal dye pots and thus get many reference yarns and no extra work. I can then test these small yarns later for fastness and compare the color before I dye a bigger amount of yarn this way. This is a long project, but maybe it will add to my knowledge about tannins as mordants.I am going to try first different sources of tannins. In the first picture there are oak galls (they look like small stones in the picture, don't they!), which contain a lot of tannins and are a traditional source of it. Jenny Dean's books say to use 25-50% of them to the dry weight of the fiber, and I'm going to use 50% now. It is then good to compare my local tannin sources to oak gall results.In the picture below there are grey alder bark, and I was thinking of using 100% of these, that is the same weight as the fiber.

IN ENGLISHI had some dry oak leaves, harvested more than 10 years ago, their color had already faded some even though I had kept them in dry and dark place. They didn't yield much color, only light yellow or grey with iron mordant, so that is why I hadn't used them, but now I was thinking that maybe also they contain tannins, it is worth a try when I have them anyway. I will use these 200%, twice as much as barks.

IN ENGLISHI would have like to include also birch bark to this experiment, but I didn't have any of them left. Also I wish I had collected fallen sumac leaves in the autumn, they contain a lot of tannins according to literature.Tannins as mordants may improve the fastness of natural dyes when compared to no mordant at all, but they don't necessarily give the same colors as when alum mordant is used. At least I have that experience when I used tannin mordant with madder, the color I got was about the same as when dyed with no mordant at all, except the lightfastness was a little better when tannin was used. Below is a picture of yarns which I dyed last week with madder, using alum as a mordant.

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WHY USE NATURAL DYES

"We can keep the knowledge of their use alive, as well as regaining for ourselves a vital contact with the natural world. The ability to correctly identify the plants needed, to understand their growth stages sufficiently well to be able to obtain the greatest dye, offer both challenge and pleasure."

We sell our yarns, mitten kits, knitted things and my husband's photographs at the market Kauppatori in Helsinki. This week we will be at the market on Monday August 14th, Tuesday August 15th, Thursday August 17th and Saturday August 19th